Commissioned by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal as part of their Generation 2006 project. Premiered Oct. 9, 2006 in Montreal, and subsequently performed in Calgary, Victoria, Edmonton, and Toronto. The Toronto concert was broadcast on CBC radio’s Two New Hours in November 2006. Elucide won a performance prize in the Canadian University Music Society composition competition, 2008.
Elucide
2006,
16’ 30”.
For chamber orchestra: flute, Bb clarinet, horn, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass.
Program notes
Elucide takes as its point of departure our perception of sound and its acoustic properties, particularly the arrangement of overtones that gives each instrument its individual timbre. By listening carefully, the ear can often discern a number of the overtones, or partials, that are present in a given timbre; however, for the most part our brains fuse the various components into a single, unified sonic object. In order to heighten our ability to perceive the richness of acoustic phenomena, Elucide deconstructs its sonic materials by using instrumental techniques that expand or alter typical overtone spectra. As well, the instruments of the ensemble are used to play the partials of particular overtone structures (such as that of the harmonics played by the piano), in effect synthesizing the timbre of a single instrument while at the same time revealing the composite nature of the sonority.
Since the act of perception is necessarily accompanied by cognition, Elucide manipulates and progressively abstracts and re-organizes the constituent elements of the sonic material into semantic units, musical ideas such as themes and motives; the piece thus explores the process by which we make sense of our aural perceptions, how we come to understand and find meaning in them.
In synthesizing a unified spectrum with the ensemble, Elucide aims to engender a certain lucidity, in the sense of transparency, whereby the identifying characteristics of the individual instruments melt away to reveal a single harmonic entity. Over the course of the work, however, this transparency transforms into another type of lucidity, meaning intelligibility, whereby the musical meaning found within the sound is elucidated.
Complete recording (24 MB):
Excerpts: